Quoditian stuides?
Another fragment of an idea:
I've started to think of (a lot of) what I'm trying to do as "quotidian studies." As soon as that term jumped into my mind, I thought someone else must have already thought of this.
I typed the term into Duck Duck Go and found an article where
As a social historian, Emmanuel Akyeampong focuses on those aspects of life that often escape the attention of scholars who chronicle the large-scale events that shape a nation’s political destiny.
Later in the article, Akyeampong says,
“What I’ve always sought to do is to take the things of everyday life, mundane things, and see them in a new light, in terms of power and economics, and in this way to rescue them from the margins,”
What Akyeampong says is interesting to me because it is concise but very focused on what this idea I'm calling quotidian studies is: A study of mundane events, actions, objects, patterns, etc. The things that make up the background/ambient conditions from which the things we choose to pay attention to rise out of.
The other aspect of what Akyeampong says that I think is interesting is that the quotidian is important because it establishes a threshold between what is normal and escapes notice and what is strange or not normal enough to demand people's attention. In this way, perhaps, the quotidian also operates as a filter for what we can choose to pay attention to.